Science gives the art world new insights into old works

July 23, 2005|By William Mullen Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO -- For the 74 years that a painting of ballet dancers by French impressionist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec has hung in the Art Institute of Chicago, historians regarded it as merely a piece from his art-student years.

At 21, Lautrec had just begun to explore the bawdy underside of Parisian nightlife when he painted "Scene de Ballet" in 1885. Normally hanging near Georges Seurat's masterpiece, "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -- 1884," it was easy to overlook.

But thanks to some fancy forensic work done by the institute's resident analytical chemist -- an unusual job title in a fine-arts museum -- Lautrec's painting is getting new respect. July 16, it proudly took its place in the traveling exhibition "Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre" at the museum.

Well before it got to Chicago, the painting had been crudely cut from its original plaster wall, ineptly restored and obscured by a dark varnish. Decades later, Francesca Casadio used high-tech tools such as a laser microscope to peer beneath the surface of the painting and reveal its hidden potential.

Using Casadio's findings as a guide, restorers began working on the piece, uncovering a vibrancy not noticed before and putting a new perspective on its place in Lautrec's career, said curator Gloria Groom.

"We never realized the importance of this painting before. It had been relatively uninteresting and boring considering other works by him," Groom said. "We truly believe now that it's an early, mature work, his first fully fledged painting of the entertainment milieu, the theme by which everyone now knows him."